Thick fog. Snow melt-water drips onto the porch roof. A sudden scrabbling of squirrel claws on locust bark—that waterfall sound.
gray squirrel
Three mourning doves disturbed by a foraging squirrel take flight. Like fast notes blown on a shakuhachi, the whistling of their wings.
A squirrel tumbles out of the big maple and catches itself in the top of a locust sapling, tail wrapping around the branch like a fifth leg.
A gray, dank morning. The light tapping of meltwater on the porch roof. A single squirrel forages in the trees at the edge of the woods.
After 15 hours of freezing fog, every twig is spiky with eldritch feathers. A squirrel makes a small thunder by running on the crusted snow.
A dark heap on the snow where a squirrel husked a walnut. Two gunshots in quick succession. Soon the mountain will be dotted with gut piles.
A rattling rain of ice from the pear tree out back where a squirrel forages. Bird tracks in the snow below the porch end with wing-prints.
A maze of squirrel and sparrow tracks between ice-covered tufts of grass glittering in the sun. Down in the valley, a siren starts up.
The silence of steadily falling snow, punctuated by the tapping of a downy woodpecker and the distant scolding of a squirrel.
Two squirrels circle warily beside the road. A third crosses the stream with a walnut between its teeth and seeing them, takes to the trees.
Unlike last night’s full moon, even this dim smudge of a sun is painful to look at. The sound of rodent teeth chiseling a black walnut.
A squirrel hurls itself from maple to locust, falling, grabbing hold. It runs to the end of a limb and stops, staring across at the walnut.
Moon in the morning sky like a broken plate. Squirrels are climbing walnut trees and descending with fat green globes between their teeth.
The clouds thicken, gravid with rain. A squirrel climbing the walnut tree next to the road pauses on the first limb to lick its genitals.